This spring has opened up with quite a bang.  Thunder, lightning, hail and rain on and off for the last few weeks can make one weary about their sensitive electronics and keeping them protected.  The good news is there are a few simple tips you can use to protect your precious devices.  Two major issues of concern are: 1. a power surge that could fry your computer and 2. potential loss of data from power failure, hard drive interruptions, etc.
Simple solutions: First of all, just like you pay for insurance in case of a catastrophe, you should consider obtaining remote data-backup service as insurance for your computer data.  Secondly, get a surge protector – not just a power strip but a real surge protector or ‘surge suppressor’.  This is basically a power strip with a fuse that will blow before the surge of electricity travels back to your computer.  If you’re really interested in protection, get an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS).  This is a battery and surge protector that you plug your computer into so that even if your power goes off your computer will keep running on that battery so you have time to save your info and shutdown properly.  Any of these items can be obtained at your local office supply or computer store.  Obviously, unplugging your computer during a lightning storm is a good idea, because if your power line is directly struck by lightning all sensitive electronics will be fried (I know this first hand – my dad lost an HD TV, HD projector and DVR this way). Finally, keep your computer out of any area of known leakage i.e. a basement that floods.  If you do these three things then you should be pretty well protected even if the worst-case scenario occurs to you.

There is a news story going around that you might have run across.  Will your computer be able to connect to the internet after July?  This is a concern for a lot of people and you might be affected.
Basically, according to an online article from Fox News over 300,000 people could lose their internet in the month of July.  Here is the gist of the story.  Some bad guys overseas created a computer virus that basically hacked into a ton of business and personal computers and stole their internet connection.  They rerouted these computers to connect through the hackers own computers so they could control their access and make the computers visit websites fraudulently to increase the advertising cost on these websites and thus steal money from advertisers.  They succeeded in hacking into a few hundred-thousand computers.  Then they were busted.
The FBI caught them and shut down their operation, but when they did they found that if they just took these hackers computers off-line that all the people they’d hacked into wouldn’t be able to get online anymore because the way these cyber-criminals messed with each users’ computers settings.  So the FBI, being the benevolent folks that they are, set up alternate computers to run all the victims internet connections so they can still connect. But it’s costing quite a bit of money for them to continue to run this service.  It was finally determined that the FBI would discontinue this service as of July and let each person handle their own problem.
So the question is: were you hacked and will you be able to connect to the internet after July?
Here is what you can do to find out: First of all, a monitored anti-virus program can detect something like this before it starts happening to your computer and can prevent your computer from getting infected… Call the Brain Mill and we’ll hook you up Having said that, at this point, since you could be one of the people affected, go to this website http://www.dns-ok.us/  If you get a green box and an “all okay” notice then you’re fine.  If the box is red and it says there is an issue, give us a call and we’ll help you through it.  You can also browse around that site and do any handlings they recommend.
If you’re interested in the full technical story (it’s kind of interesting as a story) click here.

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This will give you all the basics in less than 10 minutes.

Links:

Bamboo Tablet: http://www.wacom.com/en/Products/Bamboo/BambooTablets.aspx

Smooth Draw: http://www.smoothdraw.com/

Camstudio (Free):  http://camstudio.org/

Video Template: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0BzpypIwWhVapNzU4MTIwM2EtN2NhNC00OTI1LWIzZDQtNzE5ZDcyYzg0NDll&hl=en_US&pli=1

Gigaware headset($15): http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2850712&CAWELAID=107596931

Reference YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZJAhfaZnUA

NOTE: After the video was made I found one other setting that needs to be changed. Under Options, video options.. set the compressor to “CamStudio Lossless Codec v1.5″

A another video will be posted shortly going over the use of the screen-o-matic screen recording software.

The first video describes the basic layout of a WordPress site.

The second video gets a little more involved for the use of widgets.

I hope you found this useful and see how you could use WordPress to make and manage your website.

Sample sites setup with WordPress:

• www.acupuncturesociety.org
• www.tenmonthswithtillie.com
• www.councilofchiropracticacupuncture.org
• www.brianmehl.com
• This webpage

Let me know if I can help you out with your WordPress installation and setup.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

I found the best solution was a little known piece of software from www.wtware.com that will turn an old PC into a functional RDP client in less than 10 minutes. I have used this software to setup wired thin clients using older PCs a couple years ago however this time I needed to setup clients over a wireless network. I knew wtware supported wireless cards however I didn’t realize the limited selection of wireless card support. After working with the developer and doing some of his testing since he has limited available hardware for testing in Russia we were able to add drivers for our newer wireless cards from Belkin (F5D7000) and Linksys (WMP54G) and this easily stays at the top of my list of easy, fast RDP client deployment.

Wtware is far and away the easiest, fastest RDP client for old PCs I could find.

Wtware features

• Boot from CD, Harddrive, floppy or PXE
• 30 second install to Harddrive.
• 15 second boot to remote login screen from hard drive
• Comes with Windows install/configuration tool.
• Comes with Windows syslog utility to capture log information for debugging.
• Simple edit of configuration files from built in editor to change settings.
• Support staff very attentive and willing to make some changes to enhance operation.

Note: The wireless does only support WEP encryption and the documentation says ‘ath0’ where it should say ‘wlan0’ so beware if it doesn’t work right away don’t be afraid to ask for some support.

Other solutions tried

During this process I was concerned due to the immediate needs of my client that wtware.com might not be able to come through in the required time so I looked at several other similar applications available in the open source channel. Below is a brief review of some of the results.

Puppy Linux – After quite a bit of research I found http://pctsc.ponderworthy.org/ which gave a pretty straight-forward configuration to get up and running. This would have been my second choice since it was the second easiest to get setup.

Ubuntu – Knowing that Ubuntu has a good following I figured I could get this installed and possibly make this work. I downloaded the iso image and got it installed with minor complications. This could have worked but it was just too clunky for my needs however it was the best Linux desktop I’ve ever seen and actually selected a resolution much higher than I would have expected by default. Configuring this to go straight to a Remote Desktop client would have required very specialized skills I just don’t have. This would have been the third choice had the other two not worked out.

Cult – This actually looks to be a good possibility but I couldn’t really understand how to get it setup. It does have what looks to be a nice Chrome browser thin client implementation and some nice graphics that makes what it does do a pleasure to work with.

Thinstation – This was a disappointment to me. This may have actually worked however I couldn’t get an installable copy that would recognize the wired or wireless network card. They have this nice TS-O-Matic site that allows you to specify your requirements and then a iso image can be created. It claims to be a non-Linux admin dream but without the network card working easily I just couldn’t get it to work. Also the TS-O-Matic didn’t work in IE8 or Chrome, I could only get it to work in Firefox which was a bit of a pain. With a little work this option would be hard to beat with all the connection and hardware options that can be selected through a wizard type system builder.

AnywhereTS – This company is out of business however they have a pretty close option however it is really designed to work from a PXE boot arrangement that is a bit heavy on the Windows install (requires SQL Server lite).

Other References

• Many Small Linux Installs
• Ubuntu instructions for creating a thin client – unused but looked to be a good candidate.
• Where I found link to making Puppy Linux terminal server client operational.
• Brian Madden article on Converting PC’s into thin clients.

This works out pretty well however I have found a little incompatiablity between version 2002 and 2003 and/or the setup between my machine and the clients computer. 

The main issue seems to be with the speed in loading the forms with lots of controls.

We have one main table that contains all the orders and the related form contains 514 controls (yes a large number but it’s a client requirement as it is right now). I do most of my development on Access 2003 and then transfer the client’s computer which has Access 2002. 

The form becomes very slow to load when I transfer the database to the 2002 computer. I have found that if I open the form in the design mode, change the filter from Orderid=0 to OrderID=-1 and save the changes the system speed returns.

I have not seen any other mention of this problem and would be very interested in anyone that could shed some light on why this is the case and how it could be handled more appropriately. It becomes a real pain to put new programs online when you always have to open and modify a form to maintain the system performance.